Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Why, yes, I did watch two Odette Yustman movies in a row. Good
catch.

This is another product from the Judd Apatow Raunch Factory, but
(as usual with him) it's decently funny.
It purports to tell the story of music legend Dewey Cox, from the tragic
beginnings of his musical career to its twilight. Along the way, Dewey
hits all the clichés that you have ever seen in a musician
biopic: sex (in hi-fidelity, lo-fidelity, and infidelity modes), drugs,
family dysfunction, creative blockage, commercial sellout, delusions of
grandeur and transcendental insight, and so on. (This extends to minor
things: as in, scripted
dialogue in which famous people call each other by their full names,
so the audience will know who's supposed to be who.)

Dewey is played by the great John C. Reilly, and two of my favorite
comedienees, Kristen Wiig and Jenna Fischer, appear in major roles as
two of Dewey's wives—unfortunately, simultaneous at one point.

I probably missed some of the references, and I noticed a lot of them.
There are also a boatload of cameo appearances, even more in the
"Unrated Directors Cut" version on the DVD.
And it's eminently forgettable, other than the frontal male nudity
that I could have done without.

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

This is a memoir of Steve Martin's life up to the early 1980s, when he
stopped doing stand-up comedy.
Books by celebrities are a mixed bag, I don't read very many of
them. But I liked this one quite a bit; it's well-written and
has sharp observations and insights.

I "grew up" watching Steve Martin, starting just slightly
before he became huge. As the book details, his "overnight success" came
after years and years of toiling in small-venue semi-obscurity. We
overlapped a few years in Southern California, and it would have been
easy for me to have seen him at the Ice House in Pasadena. But …
I didn't.

A few random notes:

It's tempting, watching a wild and crazy performance, to think that it's
all very spontaneous. Martin dispells that illusion right up front:
everything is calculated. No matter how wacky and out of control
the comic appears, the jokes, motions, and facial expressions are
scripted well in advance. Behind the jovial mask, the comic is watching
and gauging reaction, focused on getting everything right. I'm not sure
why I find this interesting, but I do.

There's a lot of material about his family, particular his rocky
relationship with his father. Being a dad makes me sympathize somewhat
with his father; c'mon, Steve, isn't it possible that a lot of this
emnity was due to misunderstanding? Well, probably not. But I hope I do
better when Pun Son writes his memoir.

Perhaps surprising
for an untraditional comic, Martin has unabashed admiration for
the more conventional stand-ups from the 60s and 70s: he has kind words
for Don Rickles, Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, etc.
He has a long appreciation for the
genius of Johnny Carson.

His story of meeting Elvis is priceless. Elvis says, "Son, you have an
ob-leek sense of humor."

His politics were (and for all I know, still are) tediously liberal. At
one point they were part of his act: "All I had to do was mention
Nixon's name, and there were laughs from my collegiate audiences."

I've heard those laughs; they aren't really born out of amusement.
Fortunately, at some point Martin dropped the political jokes.

There's an "Also by Steve Martin" page up front, and it includes a list
of screenplays. Unsurprisingly, Roxanne and L. A. Story
are there. Missing in action are a lot of others, though: A Simple
Twist of Fate, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, … What's up
with that? There's plenty of space on the page.

URLs du Jour

It's scandalous that a tenured English professor would lift my
prose--scandalous whether it was intentional theft or incompetent
research. But it's particularly galling that he changed the passage just
enough to make it inaccurate.

We've noted before
that faculty should not get away with academic behavior that would land
one of their students in very hot water.

Up at Granite Grok, Skip notes
the reported efforts of the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission
to get a blogger to register as a Political Action Committee
because he sinfully endorsed election candidates.

Skip also notes the recently introduced Blogger
Protection Act of 2008 which exempts "uncompensated Internet
activity by individuals from treatment as a contribution or expenditure
under the Act, and for other purposes."

Skip thinks this is swell, and you may well agree, but I'm a little more
fundamentalist on this issue. Patterico
said it best: this is too much like asking our masters for permission to
speak. So no thanks.

George F. Will's latest
column is on the same topic, concerning
Coloradans "who expressed a political opinion without first
getting their state government's permission for political activity."
I especially liked this aside:

The regulator's motto is "Dirigo, ergo sum" -- I boss people around,
therefore I am.

Read the whole thing, especially the last paragraph, which perfectly
encapsulates one reason I will have to hold my nose very hard to vote
for John McCain this November.

But Will's proposed motto applies to more than the Speech Police.

For example,
behold the awesome judgment of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade
Bureau, a division of Your Federal Government: their functionaries have
ordered the Mt. Shasta Brewing Company of Weed, California to
cease and desist!

Cloverfield

I'm sure I am not the first to point out: this movie is a combination
of The Blair Witch Project and Godzilla. It follows a
bunch of twentysomething Manhattanites around, first at a tedious party.
But soon, five of them—oops, sorry, four of them—are on a
nightmarish run from a very ill-tempered creature.

It's a kind of
love-it-or-hate-it kind of movie, with me kind of loving it, Mrs. Salad
kind of hating it. The protagonists are narcissistic and whiny. The
movie is imagined to be shot from a single video camera they cart around
with them. As the Rifftrax guys pointed out: it looks
more authentic because it's poorly shot and the sound is lousy.

But to be fair, the special effects are impressive; given the premises,
you have to admit, yeah, the results would probably look just like that.

It's short at 85 minutes, and they could have trimmed the party scenes
more than a bit.

That wouldn't be so bad—Senators Obama and Clinton haven't
answered the questionnaire either—except that Senator McCain is
actually on the Project Vote Smart board. Well, at least he was until earlier
this month, when he was removed over this issue.
Saith
Richard Kimball,
Project President:

It is true, we had to kick McCain off our board because he signed letters
for the Project that compelled his opponents and a few thousand other
candidates to answer the Project’s questions and then refused to
answer them himself.

This gives McCain extra phony points this week.

Senator Obama deserves a mention as well. Jake Tapper reports
on his latest response to the lapel flag pin issue (which, yes, he
referred to as a "phony issue"). On the one hand,
he's quoted:

I get pretty fed up with people questioning my patriotism

On the other hand, apparently in the same speech, he's quoted:

"Then I was asked about this in Iowa," Obama said. "And somebody said
'Why don't you wear a flag pin?' I said, well, sometimes I do, sometimes
I don't. I said, although I will say that sometimes I notice that
they're people who wear flag pins but they don't always act patriotic.
And I was specifically referring to politicians, not individuals who
wear flag pins, but politicians who you see wearing flag pins and then
vote against funding for veterans, saying we can't afford it."

"When Hillary's campaign announced that I was going to be speaking all
over Oregon and in small towns and rural areas, I heard that some of the
pundits in Portland thought I was nuts," he said. "And there's an
article, I just read an article in the Associated Press that quotes a
Reed College political science professor who says that my coming to see
you won't work.

What makes this notably phony is (similar to the Obama incident above)
is: apparently in the same speech, he's quoted:

"We need to go forward together," Clinton told a cheering crowd. "I
think that pretending people in small towns in rural America don't
matter is old politics. And I think there's a more important point I'd
like to make. This rural/urban/suburban divide in America is bad for our
country. It's bad for our country. All these phony divides are bad for
our country."

Yes, he complains about "phony divides" while at the same time
castigating those fancy urban college professors, inciting his audience
to boos. This is the kind of thing that keeps Hillary on top, phonywise.

Comments: the result for "Obamateers" is disappointing,
because that is our current favorite. We have heard that his support
is weak in the Hispanic community, so maybe that explains
the lack of "Obamigos" while Clintonistas show
up with 93,500 hits.

There are 406 hits for "Obamish,"
335 hits for "Obamics,"and 146 hits for "Obamese", but the
references apply more to language than people. (E. g.: "I left my
Obamese to English dictionary in my car!") So those are not included in the
table.

Comment: if I'd included Lifetime in my theory's channel lineup, I would have
picked up Lucky Number Slevin, with Bruce Willis and
Morgan Freeman at 2pm. Who knew Lifetime had movies with guys in them?

You have to drive about 375 miles before you save a whole hour
at 70mph as opposed to 59mph. Using David's fuel economy numbers, you'd
be buying slightly under a gallon of gas for that time savings, about
$3.28 worth.

Drivers make their own calls on the time/money tradeoff but, even with
high gas prices, it's not surprising that a lot of them would prefer to
zip along at 70.

Monster.com has an illuminating
article on cutting one's commuting costs. There's a lot of common-sense
advice; e. g., keep your tires properly inflated. There are a number of
suggestions where the tradeoffs in time and convenience are elided,
e. g. pooling, mass transit.
And finally,
there's advice on looking for government/employer subsidies: in effect,
getting other people to pay for your commute. Good luck with
that.

Finally: I would have to turn in my Official Libertarian Propeller Beanie if I
didn't point out good articles from Heritage,
Cato,
and CEI detailing why government-mandated fuel economy
standards don't help the environment, don't save energy, but do nudge us
into vehicles more likely to kill us. Unfortunately, Congress and the
President ignored this advice; higher standards are on
the way.

URLs du Jour

2008-04-25

Your unintended consequence du jour is from the WSJ
yesterday, describing the recent history of Congress's efforts on
student loans, where a law passed last September put the industry in the
tank, just in time for the upcoming academic year's loan applications:

Usually, the law of unintended consequences takes so long to reveal
itself that no one remembers the culprits. But the speed at which
Congress's student lending changes have gone south is raising political
danger for Democrats, if Republicans had the wit to point it out. (They
don't; that's why they're Republicans.)

The editorial provides a helpful summary:

Congress mandated a return on student loans that is too low to attract
private capital in the current market. So Congress will now use your
money to create artificial investor demand. Taxpayers will bear more
risk so that Congress can fashion a new business model to replace the
one it just destroyed. The Bush Administration, unwisely but typically,
has endorsed this approach.

At the Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz looks
at the dismal job Hollywood does in portraying college professors. I
know some of those, and JPod has a pretty good point, and presents it amusingly
well. He looks at the latest attempt:

You can't blame moviemakers, really. It is very difficult for a
defiantly anti-intellectual medium like the cinema to capture what is
interesting about someone who spends much of his life living inside his
own head. The latest casualty is Smart People, a movie in which
-Dennis Quaid plays a fearsomely highbrow English professor. Yes, you
read that right: Dennis Quaid plays a fearsomely highbrow English
professor. This is on a par with Jessica Simpson playing Madame Curie.

Nevertheless, it's already in my Blockbuster queue.

(Unaccountably, JPod fails even to mention Ronald Reagan's performance as
Professor Peter Boyd in Bedtime for Bonzo. What
kind of conservative magazine are they running there anyway?)

But never mind professors. What about college administrators? Aren't
their movie portrayals pretty much all stamped from the Dean Wormer mold?
Well, there's arguably a good reason for that…

You may remember this YouTube from a few months back, where
some clever folks put subtitles on a clip from Downfall, turning
Adolph Hitler into a very disappointed (and, our more sensitive readers
should note, a very foulmouthed) Dallas Cowboys fan:

Officials at [the University of North Dakota] and [North Dakota State
University] today condemned a Web video that began
circulating Wednesday that links the rivalry between the two schools
with images of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Yes, they did exactly the same thing, except the subtitles
turn Hitler into a UND fan.

At first, Hitler consoles himself, saying “we still have
hockey.” He later becomes irate, yelling “I’m sick and tired
of hearing about the Bison,” denigrating UND’s declining student
enrollment and making personal attacks on UND administrators,
particularly President Charles Kupchella.

Quoted officials are full of earnest humorlessness on the topic:

UND Spokesman Peter Johnson said he was “disappointed by the
personal attacks” in the video.

Dude, the personal attacks are coming from Hitler!
Wouldn't a normal person consider those to be compliments?

NDSU vice president for university relations Keith Bjerke was more
severe in his denunciation.

“I just got off the phone with the president (NDSU President Joseph
Chapman). He’s in Korea and thank God he hasn’t seen this,”
Bjerke said. “All I can say is there’s nothing about Adolf
Hitler that I find amusing. We don’t support, condone or endorse
anything he’s babbling about.”

A brave anti-Hitler stance, indeed! I hope Keith will be able to
weather the criticism he's in for from the pro-Hitler crowd!

All I can say is, if North Dakota wants to be known as anti-Hitler, they
should rename their capital.

Iron Man is a mere one week away. I'm psyched, and trying to
avoid reading anything about the movie
that might contain spoilers. Spoilers beyond those
contained in the various trailers I've watched a few hundred times,
anyway.

Over at Wired, physics prof James Kakalios describes,
in a spoiler-free way,
the various ways Tony Stark's suit defies physical law. And
indicates why geeks consider Shellhead one of their very own:

This is due, in part, to the fact that instead of getting belted with
gamma rays or being born a demon from hell, industrialist and scientist
Tony Stark got his super powers by means of his engineering genius.

Stark is yet another engineer who doesn't know quite
enough physics to realize the wonderful stuff he's
doing is impossible.

URLs du Jour

In her April 22 Earth Day news release, Pelosi said, "The Bible tells us
in the Old Testament, 'To minister to the needs of God's creation is an
act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made
us.'"

Only problem is: nobody can find that, or anything close, in an actual Bible.

The article notes that,
in the past, the Speaker has
even gone so far as claiming the quote is from Isaiah.
If she wants to accurately quote Isaiah, I found something in
chapter 65, verse 5 that would be appropriate for her:

Unintended Consequence du Jour

2008-04-23

Longtime treehugger Lester Brown op-edded at the Washington
Post with Jonathan Lewis for Earth Day on "food-to-fuel mandates",
specifically ethanol policy. I mainly admired
this paragraph for its diplomatic way of saying oops, guess we
screwed up:

Food-to-fuel mandates were created for the right reasons. The
hope of
using American-grown crops to fuel our cars seemed like a win-win-win
scenario: Our farmers would enjoy the benefit of crop-price stability.
Our national security would be enhanced by having a new domestic energy
source. Our environment would be protected by a cleaner fuel. But the
likelihood of these outcomes was never seriously tested, and new
evidence has shown that the justifications for these mandates were
inaccurate.

Emphasis, as always, added.

Over at Knowledege Problem,
Michael
Giberson quotes that paragraph as well, and wonders out loud:

I must have missed the analysis indicating that ethanol was intended
to create crop price stability. I thought the hope was always
that the policy would push food prices up. Isn't that how increases in
demand work?

And there's lots more.

One would hope that the long track record of failure, rent-seeking, and lies
would force energy policymakers to be even a smidge more humble
in designing their next grand scheme. Unfortunately, I don't see any
evidence whatsoever that's going to happen. We're always on the road to
the next set of unintended consequences.

RiffTrax

Although I was never a True Fan, I enjoyed watching
Mystery Science Theater 3000 when I could.
(Telling Factoid: the MST3K page on Wikipedia is over 55K.
In comparison, the Jane Austen page is slightly
under 40K. You lose, Jane!)

There was a lot of peripheral daffiness in MST3K, but its core
concept was to play a cheesy movie, overlaid with ongoing humorous commentary
from the show's cast, heavy on sarcasm and pop culture references.
It was like a DVD commentary track where the commenters were very bright
college students trying to comically one-up each other.
At its best, you
were flirting with disaster if you tried to drink anything during
the movie.

The onetime star and head writer of MST3K, Michael J. Nelson, has
extended this idea to
Rifftrax. Mike, his co-stars, and
occasional guest stars provide an MP3 audio commentary on existing
DVD-available movies; you simply play the DVD and the MP3 together, and
voila! Pretty close to the original MST3K experience!

I was pointed to the site by Mr.
James Lileks who was the RiffTrax
guest commenter for Spider-Man 3. The Lileks name was good enough
for me to plunk down my $3.99.

There are a number of different ways to do it. I downloaded the
"RiffTrax Player", and purchased and downloaded
the Spider-Man 3.riff
file; it was about 48 Meg. And then I picked up the Spider-Man 3
DVD from Blockbuster.

There are a lot of (potentially confusing) tweaky
bells and whistles in the player, but it wasn't necessary
to futz with any of them. It was basically: load the DVD, run the player,
load the .riff file, hit play. There are separate
volume controls for the RiffTrax and DVD audio. (I found myself confused
because it was so simple. That's it?!)

(You can also use the player to extract the MP3 track from the
.riff file, play the DVD on your normal TV, and play the MP3 on
…
uh, whatever you can play MP3s on. I didn't try this myself, but it might be
a hassle to get the players synched up, and to maintain the
synchronization through bathroom/kitchen/phone interruptions. Especially
if you're as uncoordinated as I.)

A couple of your-mileage-may-vary questions:

Is it funny? Well, sure it was; for me, it was slightly over two hours of
near-nonstop chortling.

Is it "worth it"?
Yes. I'll probably do it again. (Specifically: they have
Cloverfield, and
that's on its way from Blockbuster.)

It's not a huge investment to check RiffTrax out, and if you're at all
interested, I encourage you to do so.

URLs du Jour

2008-04-22

Brendan Nyhan points
out that you don't need to be a conservative to politicize science.

In honor of Earth Day, Rebecca Onion at Slatediscusses the
latest "hatefully regressive" manifestation of misanthropic fantasy:
the book World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler. It's a
charming tale of post-environmental armageddon.
Ms Onion's characterization of the author's POV:

Why can't the world just collapse already? Then "we"—or, at least,
those of us with taste, discretion, and true environmental
feeling—could get on with the business of remaking it … without
all those pesky extra people around.

Atonement

Oh, wait. Not a comedy? Well, nuts. That changes my whole
interpretation of the movie.

It takes place in 1935, 1940, and (roughly) the present. The 1935
section is interminable, carefully—too carefully—setting up
characters and motivations for the rest of the film. But fortunately,
the main characters wind up three-dimensional: people I had thought to
be simple upperclass twits turn out to have depth and redeeming
qualities.

The scenes set around pre-evacuation 1940 Dunkirk are jaw-droppingly good,
catching the filth, chaos, and confused desperation of the British soldiers
waiting for a ride across the Channel. If you need a reminder that war
is Hell, this is a pretty good choice.

The brief scene set in the present is either (depending on your point
of view) a neat little trick, or a dishonest little cheat. I'm
ambivalent.

Dan in Real Life

Yes, I watched two movies in a row that toss together a hodgepodge of family
members for comic result. Good catch!

Steve Carell plays the titular Dan, a widower with three daughters and
an advice column in the local paper. He's obviously doing a heroic job
raising the young ladies on his own, but the older two are chafing
against Dad's, um, concern about their relationships with boys.

Being a father, it was more than easy to sympathize.

To make things worse, or for comedic purposes, better: they're all off
to Rhode Island for the yearly family reunion, where the clan is headed
up by everyone's dad, John Mahoney, and Dianne Wiest. Sent off by his
mother to allow for a cooloff, Dan meets Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore; they hit
it off immediately. The complication: Marie turns out to be the current
girlfriend of Dan's brother, Mitch (Dane Cook).

This is professional comedy! Once you know the setup,
it's pretty easy to predict the story arc, so you better have
some fun along the way. This is very competently done, and Steve Carell
demonstrates again that he can play other roles besides "likeable
idiot" as in The Office and, later this summer, the Get
Smart movie.

URLs du Jour

2008-04-21

Missed this in yesterday's phony campaign update: John Dickerson's
Saturday report from the Obama campaign in Slate.

As the Senator's campaign train wound from one speech where he
denounced tit-for-tat politics to the next speech where he denounced
tit-for-tat politics, his campaign hosted a conference call to engage in
the practice the candidate was busy denouncing. I suppose it would have
been an even greater act of chutzpah for the Obama campaign to host the
conference call while Sen. Obama was denouncing that kind of
behavior, but not much more of one.

All it takes
is
a decent memory to point out that the current outrage felt by leftists
about the media bringing up "tangential character issues" was nowhere to be seen
in 2004, when the character belonged to George W. Bush and the issue was
his service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Janice Brown at Cow Hampshire has cow
content. Unfortunately, she tells us
we missed celebrating World Cow Chip Day.
But she also points out we're right in the thick of Cowboy Poetry Week.

Since Janice is also a genealogist,
this gives me an excuse to boast that I am a distant relation
to Chris Sand, aka "Grandpa Boots", once Poet Lariat
of Wolf Point, Montana.

There's also strong circumstantial evidence of an even
more distant relation to a younger Chris Sand, aka Sandman,
the Rappin Cowboy.

And—not that this item has anything to do with the previous
item, cousin—you might enjoy—for sufficiently small values
of "enjoy"—the most
annoying song ever. Based on an online poll of annoyances, it
contains elements of or references to:

Death at a Funeral

This comedy is ostensibly British, but directed by an American (Frank
Oz, who will always be Miss Piggy to me). Also one of the Brits is
played by very American Alan Tudyk, but he does a decent accent, at
least to my ears.

The idea is that a family is getting together to pay last respects to
its recently-deceased patriarch. But the family is a collection of
neurotics, with various forms of insecurities,
There is also one (1) drug dealer and one (1) very short former
acquaintence of the deceased (played by Peter Dinklage, also American,
but he's playing an American, so that's all right).
The recipe is: put these people in confined quarters, stir, and watch
frantic chaos and hilarity result.

It's not bad, but it's hard to attach to any of these silly caricatures.

It's going badly for McCain when the phoniest thing
attached to his campaign is the revelation
that the "Cindy's Recipes" section of his website contained
plagiarized recipes from the Food Network and Rachael Ray.

The Baltimore Sun's Paul West reports this as if it were new:

Hillary Clinton says Barack Obama is "a good man, and I respect him
greatly." But in her final push for Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary,
Clinton is portraying her rival in a very different light: as a
phony.

She is blanketing the state with an ad attacking Obama's boast,
delivered in one of his TV commercials, that he does not accept campaign
contributions from oil companies.

"No candidate does," Clinton's ad accurately points out, since corporate
donations are against the law, and she goes on to list thousands of
dollars in individual contributions to Obama from oil company
executives.

I'd say she's trying to paint him not so much as a "phony" but as a
"liar". But that's just me.

But we're in pot-and-kettle mode, as described by Michael McAuliff
of the New York Daily News:

In the final weekend before the crucial Pennsylvania primary, Sen.
Barack Obama double-punched Sen. Hillary Clinton Saturday, slamming her
as untrustworthy while his campaign revived her phony tale of ducking
sniper fire in Bosnia.

That's major-leage phoniness, and McCain is clearly playing Triple-A at
best. Is there anything he can do to recover? Josh Brodesky of the
Arizona Daily Starreports on a dim hope,
the efforts of David Brock of Media Matters for America:

There is a media love affair that has been going on for years," [Brock] said
during a question-and-answer session Saturday with guests.

"They accept his phony brand as a straight talker, a maverick, a
moderate. That needs to be broken through."

As reported by Newsmax, Brock is currently "spearheading
an effort to launch a $40 million campaign to attack Republican John
McCain in the months leading up to the November presidential election.
But:

The new group was formed after two earlier organizations, Fund for
America and the Campaign to Defend America, failed to raise enough money
to launch a full-scale attack on McCain.

Apparently this organization will succeed due to the magic of
David Brock. But PR-wise, Brock's got a way to go:

But getting Brock to speak in an interview about the planned media
campaign against McCain proved as challenging as bridging the gap
between conservatives and liberals.

"I am not going to talk about that today," he said. "That wasn't my
subject today."

He then walked away.

Another, earlier attempt to speak with Brock was cut off when a woman
approached him about her foundation possibly donating money to Media
Matters.

"I love foundations," Brock said, rocking back on his heels, before also
walking away.

For background on Brock's ability to judge others' phoniness, see
the article "David Brock, Liar" by Timothy Noah at
Slate, and "The Real David
Brock by Christopher Hitchens at the Nation. (From the
latter: "I would say without any hesitation that [Brock] is incapable of
recognizing the truth, let alone of telling it.")

URLs du Jour

2008-04-20

One of Pun Salad's solemn duties is to notify our readers of
new web-available P. J. O'Rourke content. So check out
his account of his trip to the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Sample:

Carrier launches are astonishing events. The plane is moved to within
what seems like a bowling alley's length of the bow. A blast shield
larger than any government building driveway Khomeini-flipper rises
behind the fighter jet, and the jet's twin engines are cranked to
maximum thrust. A slot-car slot runs down the middle of the bowling
alley. The powered-up jet is held at the end of its slot by a steel
shear pin smaller than a V-8 can. When the shear pin shears the jet is
unleashed and so is a steam catapult that hurls the plane down the slot,
from 0 to 130 miles per hour in two seconds. And--if all goes well--the
airplane is airborne. This is not a pilot taking off. This is a pilot as
cat's eye marble pinched between boundless thumb and infinite forefinger
of Heaven's own Wham-O slingshot.

Did you find yourself wondering why Easter and Passover were so out
of step with each other this year? I did. If you're interested, the best
summary I found was here.
It's a lurid tale of lunar vs. solar calendars, anti-semitism, the First
Council of Nicea in 325, and the
"blood-letting pagan Hilaria and Taurobolium festivals."

A calculator for Easter and Passover dates is here,
and goes into much detail about various Easter-dating schemes, almost
certainly into the "more than you want to know" level.

URLs du Jour

2008-04-18

Not that we continue to be tax-obsessed or anything, but
there's a good
op-ed column from Yaron Brook at Forbes convincingly decrying the
proliferation of nanny-statism via the tax code. Examples aplenty. The
bottom line:

If government were restricted to its proper functions--police, courts
and a strong military to defend individual rights against physical force
and fraud--our 66,000-page coercive tax code would be a thing of the
past. What's more, a great burden would be lifted, not just from the
economy, but from our lives.

Imagine reasserting ourselves as rational, sovereign individuals, whose
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include the right
to choose values without asking society's permission--and without
chasing our own money, like lab rats sniffing cheese, down the twisting
corridors of a labyrinthine tax code.

It's kind of old—three whole days!—but lovers of irony
will appreciate Bill Bradley's inside account of how Obama's
pop-lefty sociology on bitter small-town voters made it into the
Huffington Post, with Arianna Huffington herself weighing
in from the South Pacific, where she was vacationing on David Geffen's
454-foot yacht.

I like to imagine that at some point she said, "No, of course
Obama's comments don't
sound elitist to me, darling! Don't be silly! … No, I asked
around, and nobody else here thinks they're elitist either."

The Ruins

I really liked Scott Smith's A Simple Plan from 1993, so when I
saw he'd come out with another one, I bit. (Yes, he's not exactly
prolific.)

While A Simple Plan was a taut tragic-noir thriller, The
Ruins is pretty much straight horror, and kind of long at over
500 pages. It doesn't seem bloated though: everything's there
for a reason.

It concerns four young Americans vacationing on the Mexican coast;
they befriend
a German and three Greeks. The German's brother wandered inland with
a archeologists to explore, and hasn't returned.
He, the Americans, and one Greek decide to go after him. Things go
very very badly for them over the next 495 pages.

The book takes its time getting up to
speed, but eventually became a page-turner for me. Without going into
spoiler territory, both A Simple
Plan and this book contain characters with flaws not particularly
noticeable in everyday life, but external events conspire to turn those
flaws into gaping maws of death, doom, and destruction.

Smith also wrote the screenplay for the movie based on this book, which
is bombing in theaters as I type. I'll probably rent the DVD just to see
what's different.

The Pianist

For some reason, we'd missed seeing this 2002 movie that got Adrien
Brody a Best Actor Oscar and serious smoochery
with Halle Berry.
As I type, it is #56 on IMDB's list of the
250 Best Movies of All Time, it has a solid 95% on the
TomatoMeter, and I probably should have liked it even more than I did.

Brody plays Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jew with the misfortune to be living
in Warsaw in September 1939 as WWII kicks off with the invasion of
Poland. In a stunning opening scene, he is playing the piano for a live
radio broadcast as the bombs begin to fall. Everyone's telling him to
stop and run for cover; he continues playing until (nearly literally)
the walls are falling down around him. A neat picture
of artistic devotion, married to a
spacy detachment from the real world.

It's based on a true story. While I kept expecting Spillman to (for
example) participate in the Ghetto Uprising, or some other act of
resistance, his actions are limited to observing the horror and trying
to survive, mainly by dumb luck and the goodwill of others. One of the most
powerful developments happens near the end, when he's harbored by a
German officer. Just before the closing credits, it's revealed
that the German
met a richly undeserved fate. Just
like pretty much every other decent person in the movie.

The movie is unrelenting in its depiction of the horrible degredation
and violence unleashed
against the Polish Jews. It's also an unambiguous condemnation of
passivity in the face of oppression and aggression.

So after all that, I feel a little guilty that I liked Adrien Brody in
King Kong better. Moviewise, under this aging exterior,
I'm still a teenage philistine at heart …

URLs du Jour

2008-04-16

Unintended
consequence du jour, where one of the folks in charge admits
that they don't know what the Hell they're doing, and are too craven to
fix a broken policy:

Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said he had come
to realize that Congress made a mistake in backing biofuels, not
anticipating the impact on food costs. He said Congress needed to
reconsider its policy, though he acknowledged that would be difficult.

“If there was a secret vote, there is a pretty large number of
people who would like to reassess what we are doing,” he said.

In the pantheon of
well-intentioned governmental policies gone awry, massive ethanol biofuel production may
go down
as one of the biggest blunders in history. An unholy alliance of
environmentalists, agribusiness, biofuel corporations and politicians
has been touting ethanol as the
cure to all our environmental
ills, when in fact it may be doing more
harm than
good. An array of unintended
consequences is wreaking havoc on the economy, food production and,
perhaps
most ironically, the environment.

"Screw 'em," she told her husband. "You don't owe them a thing, Bill.
They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them."

Stein reports this as big news, but it was in Sally Bedell Smith's
book on the Clintons (For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton:
The White House Years) late last year, as this Jake Tapper blogpost
demonstrates.

As they say: pass the popcorn. I could watch Democrats argue about which
candidate is
more disdainful of working class people all day long.

[Update: The Minuteman makes the case
that Stein is taking Hillary's comments out of context.]

I meant to put this in yesterday's tax-heavy post, but you'll certainly
want to read a new Dave
Barry article on the subject. His tax preparation method involves
this bag of receipts …

At tax time, I go through this bag, hoping to find receipts that say
things like, ''BUSINESS SUPPLIES TO BE USED FOR BUSINESS -- $417.23.''
Instead, I find some ticket stubs for Shrek the Third and
several hundred wadded-up snippets of paper on which the only legible
printing says ''Thank You.'' Now, because I am mentioning Shrek the
Third in this column, I can legally deduct the $10 cost of my
ticket, plus a large popcorn, which I estimate cost $53, for a total of
$63, or, rounding off, $250. But that still leaves me a little short of
what I need, deductionwise.

God help me, I'm thinking: If the IRS goes after Dave, maybe they'll
use the guys that would otherwise have gone after me.

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep

This is a fun, family-friendly movie about a boy and his sea serpent.
No, it's not a live-action remake of Beany and Cecil. I wish!
But it's still pretty good.

It's set in a remote part of Scotland—specifically, Loch
Ness—during World War II. Little Angus is moody and lonely in the absence
of his father, but he enjoys poking around the lochshore, picking up
random bits of biology. But one day he comes across this funny egg-shaped
rock. Which turns out to be an actual egg. The results are pictured on
the DVD box over there on the right. (No, your right.)

There are a number of complications: a British artillery squad commandeers
the manor for which Angus's mom is the caretaker. A dark mysterious
stranger shows up and is hired as a handyman. Angus wants to keep his
pet monster a secret from the grownups, of course—this is a
requirement for all such movies—and this gives rise to a number of
humorous slapstick scenes.

Acting is very good, and the effects are great. The plot is more than a bit
predictable, but I didn't mind that too much. (A quick check of a map
of the Loch Ness area shows that the filmmakers also got a little creative
with the geography, but that's OK too.)

URLs du Jour

Happy Tax Day, everybody! Those who can deal with a bit—well, OK,
a lot—of profanity will want to check out Rachel Lucas's tirade on tax-paying.

A similar post from Megan McArdle is also worth checking
out, and Megan keeps it PG, but she's pretty steamed:

I should not have, in the course of paying my debt to society, to
spend nine hours answering questions about my educational habits,
proclivity to recycle, the location of my potentially qualified small
business, whether or not I happen to farm, or any of the 87 trillion
other things TurboTax wanted to know. It might have been 87 zillion.
Frankly, I lost count.

More than two hundred years ago, we fought a whole revolution and
everything to get the government to leave us the hell alone. Now
it thinks it's entitled to know whether I am a qualified small business
owning woman. Small business? Check. Woman? Check. Qualified? Who
the hell do you think you are, Mr. Tax Man?

Megan gets the coveted Read The Whole Thing Award for the day, because
there's much more there, including a tax proposal that's both (a) a
self-evident immense improvement over the current system and (b) a total
political impossibility.

You can send your blood pressure still closer to the danger zone
by perusing today's WSJ editorial on "The Loophole
Factory", which examines how Congress eagerly creates new tax-code
"benefits" for well-connected industries.

Congress is creating all of these new loopholes even as overall tax
revenues are slowing and this year's budget deficit could reach $450
billion to $500 billion. This will play nicely into the hands of
Democrats who contend that the lower tax rates of 2001 and 2003 must
expire to pay the government's bills. So we could soon have the worst of
all worlds: a leaky tax code full of exceptions for powerful interests,
but with ever higher rates to make up for the loopholes. Congress gets
PAC contributions in return for the loopholes, plus any extra revenue
from the tax hike. The losers are taxpayers who aren't powerful or rich
enough to afford a tax lobbyist.

My only quibble is with the editorial's description on (today's) main page:

For Democrats, tax "fairness" means raising rates so they can sell
breaks to the highest bidder.

The body of the editorial makes it abundantly
clear that loophole-generation is a
bipartisan effort. Republicans are largely angling to get their
own giveaways included in legislation, or playing meek doormats.
(A regrettable local example is provided by our
own Senator Sununu.)

It's a good day to recall the words of the great philosopher Arthur Godfrey:

I am proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is
– I could be just as proud for half the money.

That's from the Tax Quotes page maintained by …
the IRS! At taxpayer expense! I can't decide whether to be outraged or
amused!

(The page dutifully reminds: "These quotes reflect the opinions
of their authors; their inclusion here is not an official IRS
endorsement of the sentiments expressed." OK. Amusement wins.)

On to less taxing matters:
Congratulations to Joe Malchow's Dartblog, the deserving winner
of this year's "Best College Blog" award from America's Future
Foundation. Joe, and the university on the other side of our fair state,
should be proud.

On the lighter side, we've been occasionally amused by the MPAA's brief
explanations under their movie ratings. The Iron Law of the Internet:
one person's occasional amusement can be turned into a full-fledged
obsession by someone with adequate time on their hands. Hence, you
can take Ken Jennings' quiz to see if you can identify a
movie, given the year, rating, and MPAA description. An easy one:

Beowulf

You might remember the basic plot from high school lit class: Hrothgar
and his Danish kingdom are sorely tried by ravaging monster Grendel; a band of
out-of-town Geats led by our title character show up to dispatch same.
But Grendel has a mom, and she's a little ticked at that.

A simple story, but the movie script has been Gaimanized to make it more
complicated, gray-scaled, and interesting.
Grendel is more like the cranky geezer
trying to get the rowdy neighbor to quiet down his raucous partying.
Sure, he's overreacting a bit—biting peoples' heads off and
all—but we're more sympathetic.
Grendel's mom is kind of a babe. And the movie seems to want to make a
point about heroic leadership making Faustian bargains with their
supposed foes. Fine.

The movie is shot in that CGI/live-action hybrid process previously used
in The Polar Express. It allows for spectacular effects, but also
gives the human actors a creepy Disney-animatronic look all too often.

There are also a number of shots that will tell you, if you didn't know
already, that there's a 3-D version out there somewhere. As anyone who's
seen Dr.
Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes will tell you, those effects
look pretty lame on a TV.

I Give Up on Andrew Sullivan

William Kristol's NYTop-ed column
today concerns Obama's "now-famous comment" about how the hicks in the
sticks "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't
like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way
to explain their frustrations."

The headline of Kristol's column is "The Mask Slips." He digs out, for
comparison, the well known Marxian quote:

Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering
and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of
a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.

Andrew Sullivan has a response, titled "Now
He's A Godless Commie". Sullivan claims that Kristol's
headline
is saying that Obama's "voluminous writing and speaking about the
sincerity of his own religious faith, and of others, are presumably
'masks.'" Sullivan claims that Kristol infers "Obama's Marxism."
And:

He's calling him a lying, Godless communist.

So you can link-click for yourself to determine how on-target Sullivan's
claims about Kristol's column are. My view is: they're not even close.
For example, the sole occurrence of "mask" in Kristol's column is
specifically not about Obama's faith:

What does this mean for Obama’s presidential prospects? He’s
disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois
America. He’s usually good at disguising this. But in San Francisco
the mask slipped. And it’s not so easy to get elected by a citizenry
you patronize.

Kristol's pretty clear: Obama's "mask" is not convering
up his Godless communism; it's covering up his disdainful, patronizing,
elitism.

If that were all there was to Sullivan's rant, big deal.
So he's misrepresenting his opponents' arguments, and not in a
particularly clever way. So what? For Sullivan, this is pretty standard
operating procedure.

But in his last paragraph, Sullivan lets his own mask slip:

A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a
liar about his own faith.

Sullivan's characterization of Kristol's column is wrong.
The only true thing about the sentence:
Kristol is Jewish. And that little fact is clearly
something Sullivan thought he needed to drag into the discussion.

That's odious.

Sullivan has flirted with religious bigotry before, when he teed
off on Mitt
Romney's Mormonism, including speculations on whether
Romney wore "Mormon underwear".

For me, this is the last straw. I probably put up with Sullivan
longer than I should have because I enjoyed his anti-Clinton stuff.
My bad.

Sullivan may, as he has in the past, admit that he went off half-cocked
on this. If he does, I might hear about that by reading others; I won't
be going back to his website.

John Dickerson from Slatemuses
on the likely McCain strategy against Obama:

The GOP's attack will
boil down to the accusation that Obama is a big phony. The Democrat
gives them an opening: Obama talks about how he goes in front of hostile
audiences, but he doesn't
really do it much. He heralds his bipartisan appeal and talent for
bringing people together, but his track record on these fronts is thin.
He talks about how his administration will put its negotiations over
policy on C-SPAN, but he has run a conventionally conservative campaign,
keeping press access relatively low. When his top economic aide (and
former Slate contributor), Austan Goolsbee, got into trouble, the campaign hid him under a
bushel rather than offering him to reporters to answer questions. "Obama
talks about doing these things," says a McCain aide, "he just doesn't do
them." With big acts of accessibility and reaching out beyond his party
ranks, McCain hopes to show as well as tell that Obama's promises to do
the same are empty.

Pun Salad is in favor of keeping the phoniness issue on the front
burner, but the pots and kettles on that front burner are all pretty
black.

A number of people have pointed out the sheer phoniness of Obama's
inclusion of "anti-trade sentiment" in his short list
of nasty attitudes in the small towns of Pennsylvania and the midwest.
For example, Victor Davis Hanson:

It was not George Bush or John McCain, but Barack Obama himself who tried
to salvage Ohio by demagoguing NAFTA and opposing a free-trade agreement
with Columbia. His entire campaign is predicated on showing more
anti-trade sentiment that the Clintons.

Barack Obama owes Austan Goolsbee an apology. Approximately one month
before the Ohio primary, Goolsbee, an informal adviser to the Obama
campaign, attended a meeting with Canadian government officials at which
he was asked about Obama's apparent hostility to NAFTA. According to a
memo written about the meeting, Goolsbee told the Canadians, “much
of the rhetoric that may be perceived to be protectionist is more
reflective of political maneuvering than policy.”

Obama channels Smoot-Hawley to the yahoos, and Goolsbee to the elite.
For connoisseurs of the phony, that's pretty good.

But Hillary's still on top, phony-wise, and for good reason.
Dick Morris detects
tergiversation in Hillary's current anti-NAFTA rhetoric:

Trade was no side issue in the Clinton administration; it was
central to his key worldview — that he had to lead America to
compete successfully in the new global economy. His refusal to submit
to protectionism or to legislation to reduce layoffs — his
commitment to the free market — was a singular badge of courage in
his presidency. For Hillary to indicate now so fundamental a
disagreement with a policy so integral to her husbands’ presidency
is transparently phony.

To be fair, you should also read Sam Stein's attempt
(a couple months
back) at the Huffington
Post to say, hey, no, she was really anti-NAFTA back then too. A
bunch of people are quoted to that effect, and some of them might
not be angling for positions in Hillary's administration.

So why didn't we hear such protests from Hillary Clinton during her
husband's administration?

"The whole time that she was first lady," said Robert Shapiro, the
undersecretary of commerce during the Clinton White House years, "she,
like everybody else...[was] not supposed to deviate from the position of
the administration. There is no freedom of speech in there, and that
certainly applies to a first lady."

So the defense is: sure, she was phony back then,
but we're getting the real deal now.

Obama Has a Vision

Who'da thunk that a Huffington Postcontributor
would send a torpedo into the Obama campaign? Mayhill Fowler
transcribes Obama's words to an elite California audience:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of
small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and
nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton
administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive
administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna
regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get
bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't
like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way
to explain their frustrations.

I thought: I've seen this before.
From Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Anointed, pp. 119-120:

For those with the vision of the anointed, it is not sufficient to
discredit or denigrate proponents of the tragic vision. The general
public must also be discredited, as well as the social processes
through which the public's desires are expressed, individually or
collectively, such as a market economy or social traditions. In short,
all alternative to the vision of the anointed must be put out of court,
by one means or another. Nowhere is evidence considered so unnecessary
as in making sweeping denigrations of the public. Mass psychoanalysis of
"society" is a common pattern …

Sowell follows with a large number of examples from such luminaries
as Karl Menninger, Tom Wicker, Anna Quindlen, Jimmy Carter, and many
more. Today, he has one more.

URLs du Jour

In a press
release today from the Alberta government on new royalty programs
for high cost oil and gas development, the term “unintended
consequences” was thrown around liberally.

The blogger is correct; I count five occurrences in the short
release. It's all about how raising taxes last year caused "unintended"
slowdowns in oil and gas production in the province. Comments the
blogger:

So let me get this straight: To generate the oil and gas royalty
revenues anticipated in the New Royalty Framework, the government has
been forced to lower the royalty tax increases announced last year in
the...New Royalty Framework.

With the FAA grounding flights in the name of safety, few people seem to
have appreciated that the action may well kill people.

Why? Because a significant fraction of people will use riskier forms of
transportation than American Airlines as a result, killing some. Not as
spectacular as an air crash, but in onesies-twosies all over the
country. Murray calls this a substitution of "a dispersed risk for a
concentrated risk."

URLs du Jour

2008-04-10

Unintended consequence du jour:
Journalist George Smith had the unenviable task of writing a column
on the doings of the Maine state Legislature, and found it useful
to muse on the resulting raft of unintended consequences. Here's my fave:

In my sportsmen's corner of the world, there is a good example of
unanticipated consequences in an action taken last year by the
Legislature: a new law requiring alien (non-citizen) hunters to hire a
guide to hunt moose, bear and deer.

Canadian hunters by the bucket
load demanded and received refunds on their expensive big game licenses,
costing the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife tens of
thousands of dollars. Some Canadians signed up to take DIF&W's test
to become guides themselves, and DIF&W was required to provide
translators for applicants who spoke French, another
unanticipated
cost.

North Maine Woods, the recreational manager for 30 private
owners of 2 million acres where many Quebec sportsmen hunt, lost 19
percent of its traffic in the fall hunting seasons. To make that up,
every Mainer this year will pay an extra dollar a day to access and
enjoy that land.

Ah, if we'd only known!

[Emphasis added.]
There's also stuff about how the Maine/New Hampshire
tax difference redounds to the Granite State's favor.

Which gives me an excuse to post a link to the
Tax Foundation's recently-released
list of tax burdens state-by-state as of 2007. Maine's state/local tax
burden, 14.0%, is the second-highest; it barely missed out to Vermont's
14.1%. New Hampshire's tax burden is calculated at 8.0%, which puts it
second-lowest. (Alaska, at 6.6%, is in the bottom place.)

Interestingly, when you add in Federal taxes, NH rises to 29th place; ME
drops to 10th. People have more income here. To make an obvious point,
one major reason for that is the tax policy of other states.

In "Best of the Web Today" for, um, yesterday, James Taranto
analyzes an article appearing in UNH's student
newspaper the day before yesterday.

James says: "The story delivers an elegant synecdoche for race
relations in America."

I'm almost certain that fewer than one writer for the student newspaper
would be able to tell you what a "synecdoche" is.

There's a lot of Saturday Night Live stuff, understandably,
but unaccountably
missing is 1997's "Job Interview" with Chris Kattan playing straight man
to Steve Buscemi. I can't find a video, but the transcript is here.
And it's not even on the "The Best of Chris Kattan" SNL DVD. That
sucks!

To this day, any mention of Pepperdine will cause me to
blurt "I've heard of Pepperdine. Is that all right that I've
heard of it?"

I Took an Online Test and …

URLs du Jour

2008-04-08

Thomas Sowell has random thoughts, and (as usual)
they're more worthwhile than the ordered thoughts of many others.

Nothing is more fraudulent than calls for a "dialogue on race." Those
who issue such calls are usually quick to cry "racism" at any frank
criticism. They are almost invariably seeking a monologue on race, to
which others are supposed to listen.

Much more randomness at the link.

You can view the editorial cartoons of Pulitzer Prize winner
Michael Ramirez here.

Also Pulitzerwise: Dave
Barry and Joel
Achenbach have nice things to say about winner Gene Weingarten.
Weingarten's prizewinning piece, about a world-renowned violinist
posing as a Metro-stop musician, is hilarious and here.
Pun Salad, as did much of the blogosphere, also enjoyed his piece
from a couple years back
on The
Great Zucchini, "Washington's No. 1 preschool entertainer."

A health warning meant to alert doctors about the potential risks of
prescribing antidepressants to youth may have actually triggered a
significant rise in suicides among Canadians under age 18, a new study
has found.

The warning came from "Health Canda", which claims to be
the "Federal department
responsible for helping Canadians maintain and improve their health."

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Despite numerous promises in his lifetime to allow
his guns to be taken from his cold, dead hands, the late Charlton Heston
issued a statement today saying that he will retain possession of his
firearms into the afterlife.

URLs du Jour

2008-04-07

This would never happen at Dunkin Donuts:
Starbucks has denied a customer's request
to put "Laissez Faire" on his customized Starbucks card. [Update,
2008-04-10: reportedly reversed. Yay!]

We did that whole thing on patriotism-questionin' yesterday, and not to beat a dead horse on that
or anything, but … Michelle points to
a first-person
report from the "legislative district caucus" of the 43rd district
in Seattle, Washington:

At the mere mention of doing the pledge there were groans and boos.
Then, when the district chair put the idea of doing the Pledge of
Allegiance up to a vote, it was overwhelmingly voted
down. One might more accurately say the idea of pledging
allegiance to the flag (of which there was only one in the room, by the
way, on some delegate’s hat) was shouted down.

"Just don't question their patriotism."
Sam Gamgee was there, too.

Meanwhile, Obama is trying
real hard to ratchet up the patriotism-content. If he's not
careful, he'll
lose the votes of the 43rd district. (Via Hugh Hewitt.)

If you're not yet Hestoned out, Scott at Power Line
has a great
post; among other tidbits, he's impressed with Stephen Hunter's tribute
at the Washington
Post, and so am I.

Continuing in that mortality vein: if you didn't make it
to William F. Buckley Jr.'s memorial at St. Patrick's Cathedral,
reading Shawn
Macomber is the next best thing. The description
of son Christopher Buckley's eulogy is both moving and funny:

"We talked about this day, he and I," Buckley began as he settled in to
give the father he described as "the world's coolest mentor" his due.
"He said, 'If I'm still famous try to get the cardinal to do the service
at St. Patrick's. If I'm not, just tuck me away in Stamford." The
humorist waited two beats then added, "Well, Pop, I guess you're still
famous."

I also liked Rob Long's purloined memo from St. Peter
on "recent complaints" about the ruckus Mr. Buckley is causing.

Mr. Karl Marx has registered several formal complaints with the
Administration about your repeated pranks — I believe, but cannot
prove, that you and Milton Friedman were responsible for what we’re
going to call the “jello incident” — and really, sir, if the
gentleman doesn’t want to appear in a debate you’ve arranged on
the topic “Resolved: This house believes that Marxism is an
esophoric condition,” then please, do not keep asking him. Mr. Marx
is here on a rather tenuous basis, and wishes to keep a low profile.

We Own the Night

Surprisingly uninteresting!

This movie is set in 1988 New York City, in which the Russian mob is
trying to establish a serious drug trade. They're up against the cops,
represented by the Grusinsky family: father Bert (Robert Duvall) and
son Joe (Mark Wahlberg). The black sheep of the family is Bobby (Joaquin
Phoenix), who runs a local popular dance club, in which one of the drug
kingpins hangs out. He has a very attractive girlfriend, Amada (Eva
Mendes).
Problems, and eventually, tragedy,
occur when Bert and Joe ask Bobby to help them out in their
investigations.

Movies should assume that everyone in their audience comes in
with a big why should I care about this? sign on their foreheads.
This movie never makes much of an attempt to answer that question.

Like it or not, of the three remaining candidates, Obama draws far more
than his share of the "patriotism" comments. Nobody even thinks about
McCain's patriotism; it's obvious, and just taken for granted. Nobody
thinks about Hillary's patriotism either; it's pretty much assumed that
power-hunger is her prime motivator.

Here's Jonah Goldberg who wonders why the Left (generally) and Obama
(specifically) are so reluctant on appealing to patriotism in their
otherwise stem-winding campaign rhetoric:

To invoke patriotism seriously is to brand yourself either an old fogy
or a right-wing bully. If Barack Obama spoke about patriotism with the
sort of passion he expends on unity, many would take him for some sort
of demagogue.

But Jonah's observations are being echoed outside the Wingnut Community.
Joe Klein at Time observes:

Patriotism is, sadly, a crucial challenge for Obama now. His aides
believe that the Wright controversy was more about anti-Americanism than
it was about race. Michelle Obama's unfortunate comment that the success
of the campaign had made her proud of America "for the first time" in
her adult life and the Senator's own decision to stow his American-flag
lapel pin — plus his Islamic-sounding name — have fed a
scurrilous undercurrent of doubt about whether he is "American" enough.

This drives doctrinaire lefties bananas. For example, at the Carpetbagger
Report, Steve Benen looks at Klein's and Goldberg's comments and
pronounces the topic "tiresome". And he links to a Media Matters report
that (as near as I can tell) documents every single occasion of Obama's
favorable mentions of "patriotism" and "patriots".

Which of course, is fine. CNN
asked Obama back in February how he would
"fight the image of being unpatriotic."

"The way I will respond to it is with the truth: that I owe everything I
am to this country," he said.

That's pretty good! But political rhetoric is primarily judged on how
it sways people. As Klein and Goldberg show, Obama's rhetoric, uplifting
as it is in other areas, just isn't particularly effective on this
topic.

You might be forgiven for thinking that actual
patriotism-questioning is relatively rare; much more common
is outraged reaction to perceived patriotism-questioning. Fred
Barnes has a pretty good summary
of what he calls "patriotism paranoia":

When criticized for being soft or wrong on national security, Democrats
routinely respond that their patriotism is being questioned. In fact,
they're rarely if ever accused of being unpatriotic. But to the
paranoid, that's immaterial.

Charlton Heston

I said awhile back that Will Smith was the current go-to guy for
big-budget science fiction movies. A few decades ago, that niche
was inhabited by Charlton Heston: Soylent Green, The Omega
Man, and Planet of the Apes. Practically anyone else
in those roles would have made those flicks utterly forgettable.

I also enjoyed him a lot as Cardinal Richelieu
in Richard Lester's great Musketeers movies.

Back in college, I got the chance to see him as John Proctor
in The Crucible at the Ahmanson Theatre in LA. My buddies
and I were up in the nosebleed section, but he had enough acting
power to fill the room. He was the real deal.

Unintended. But Predictable.

Bloggers of a libertarian bent, are you ever at a loss for ideas?
Try
searching the Google News for "unintended
consequence". New blog-fodder every day. You're welcome.

Today's
example is from the New York Times, an article with the
headline "In Massachusetts, Universal Coverage Strains Care". Our phrase
shows up in paragraph four; I'll also quote paragraph three for
context:

In pockets of the United States, rural and urban, a confluence of market
and medical forces has been widening the gap between the supply of
primary care physicians and the demand for their services. Modest pay,
medical school debt, an aging population and the prevalence of chronic
disease have each played a role.

Now in Massachusetts, in an unintended consequence of universal
coverage, the imbalance is being exacerbated by the state’s new law
requiring residents to have health insurance.

[Emphasis added]

It's a "good" article, in the sense that it's well-written, with
multiple interviews diligently reported. But on the other hand, I
found myself wanting to give the reporter, Kevin Sack, and most of the
people he interviewed, a moderate
whack upside the head with a clue bat.

The article's hook is provided by Dr. Katherine J. Atkinson ("Dr.
Kate"), a family physician based in Amherst, MA. She's got a long
waiting list for accepting patients, and—even if you are
a patient—her next scheduled opening for
a routine physical is in May of 2009.

At the end of the article, Dr. Kate reveals her dissatisfaction:

“I calculated that every time I have a Medicare patient it’s
like handing them a $20 bill when they leave,” she said. “I
never went into medicine to get rich, but I never expected to feel as
disrespected as I feel. Where is the incentive for a practice like
ours?”

Hmmm, incentive. Where have I seen that word before?

Gosh, if only there were some sort of system to more efficiently
allocate economic resources to where they were most demanded, and to
provide incentives for people who provide goods and services to people
who want them!

Well, yeah there is. Nobody in Amherst is approaching the local butcher
at a ballet recital, begging to be put on his waiting list for pork
chops. If an Amherst resident wants an iPod, a hammer, diapers,
gasoline, …, pretty much whatever, he or she can get those
things today, not schedule an appointment for them to be
provided more than a year in the future.

But the good people of Massachusetts decided not to go that direction
for medical care. They took a field already unusually awash in
government regulation, licensing, red tape, price controls, subsidies
… and they then decided to throw in some more, ushered in
under the mantra of "universal coverage."

Nobody in the article
seems to know what to do about this, other than more of the same
tinkering-at-taxpayer-expense:

Here in Massachusetts, legislative leaders have proposed bills to
forgive medical school debt for those willing to practice primary care
in underserved areas; a similar law, worth $15.6 million, passed in New
York this week.

The single feeble nod to anything resembling a free market reform:

Massachusetts also recently authorized the opening of clinics in drug
stores, hoping to relieve the pressure.

Bay Staters, rejoice! It's now legal to do something that never should
have been illegal in the first place! Huzzah!

A number of candidates are promising to bring
Massachusetts-style "universal coverage" to the rest of us.
If that happens, bet on a big upswing in the "unintended consequence" Google hits.

Who Could Imagine?

When the minimum wage was increased, some predicted that
employers would react by cutting jobs, and cutting hours
for those who remained employed. At Cafe
Hayek, Russ Roberts relates a yarn Hillary told Jay Leno on the
Tonight show:

I was in Indianapolis the other day and I was shaking hands after I
spoke. And there was this young boy about eleven years old and he's
trying to tell me something—you know the crowd was yelling—so I
leaned over and he said, "You know, my mom makes minimum wage and even
though it went up, her hours were cut. So we're not making any more
money. Can you help her?"

(If your first thought was, instead: "I bet
Hillary made that up," well, you're probably right about that too.
I think she's learning, probably
too late, to make her anecdotes as unfalsifiable
as possible.)

Coming Soon to a Nanny State Near You

I noted earlier
this week that all three leading presidential candidates
think it's time for Your Federal Government to "stem the growing
epidemic of obesity". So it's worth paying attention to how that
sort of thing plays out
elsewhere:

Corporate Japan will join the country's battle against bulging
waistlines next month with the introduction of compulsory "flab checks"
for the over-40s and penalties for firms that fail to bring their
employees' weight under control.

About the only ray of optimism here is the observation that We Truly
Are One People, despite cultural and racial differences. Because
Japanese nanny-staters sound exactly like ours:

"If it can prevent even a small number of people from developing
cardiovascular diseases it will be good news for them and their
families," Yuji Matsuzawa, director of the Japan Society for the Study
of Obesity, wrote in the Asahi newspaper.

The article makes no mention of the new policy's impact on sumo wrestling.
(Via Kip Esquire.)

Asymmetry

I can’t vote for him. He is an honest-to-God lefty. He apparently
has learned nothing from the 1960s. His Supreme Court nominees would be
disasters. And maybe he is too green and has lived too much of his adult
life in a politically correct bubble. But the other day he talked about
race in ways that no other major politician has tried to do, with a
level of honesty that no other major politician has dared, and with more
insight than any other major politician possesses. Not bad.

But it turns out that Obama isn't particularly keen on Murray. Hugh
Hewitt shelled out $3.95 for an NPR transcript of a 1994 "commentary"
from Obama:

"With one finger out to the political wind," Obama continued, "Mr.
Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return
to good old-fashioned racism so long as it's artfully packaged and can
admit for exceptions like Colin Powell."

That was fourteen years ago, but the difference in attitudes
is pretty striking.

this
analysis by Arnold Kling on the current housing bill's
efforts to bail out homebuilders
who speculated unwisely on ever-rising housing prices.

Arnold concludes with a more general lesson:

Pundits have been braying that the subprime mortgage crisis demonstrates
the failure of private markets and the need for more regulation. They
say that the crisis is a reminder of why we need more government
intervention, not less. The housing bill is a reminder of the opposite.

So true. (And a sage commenter sagely comments: "Note that when we want to bail
them out, they're not developers. They're homebuilders.")

Which is fine, in theory. In practice,
it took Colorado College about 30 minutes to examine
their deepest feelings about free expression on campus, and say: Just
kidding!

The "Feminists and Gender Studies Interns" at CC print up a newsletter
entitled the "The Monthly Rag." You can read a poorly-reproduced
copy here,
but here is, I think, a fair
summary:

The flyer included a reference to "male castration," an
announcement about a lecture on "feminist porn" by a "world-famous
prostitute and porn star," [the aging Annie Sprinkle, for those of you with
fond memories of Wild Pussycats and Satan was a Lady]
an explanation of "packing" (pretending to
have a phallus), and a quotation from The Bitch Manifesto.

CC student Chris Robinson, and an unnamed accomplice, perhaps taking
that "free and open" thing a bit too seriously, published a parody
of "The Monthly Rag" entitled "The Monthly Bag" (PDF here)
under the pseudonymous "Coalition of Some Dudes".
Summary:

The flyer included references to "chainsaw etiquette," the shooting
range of a sniper rifle, a quotation regarding a sexual position from
the website menshealth.com, and a quotation about "female violence and
abuse" of men from the website batteredmen.com.

Which brings nothing to mind more than the very old, but very
appropriate, joke:

The appearance of our satire was handled in a manner which in many ways
approximated to, say, the way Wahhabbi Islam hunts down apostasy.
Apostasy, for the interested party, is the ultimate crime in Islam: an
apostate is one who has known the true faith and deviated from it, and
his punishment for this shall be death.

The college opens for business at 8 am. By 8:30 am on the day of
publication, I observed security forces tearing down our satire. Wow.
Who would have the power and zeal to initiate such a crackdown? I'm not
sure, but all I can say is the Chinese Communist Party would be proud.

CC's president, ex-Ohio governor (and Democrat) Richard Celeste
apparently issued a mass-emailing of denunciation aimed at the
parody, and demanded that the authors present themselves for
judgment. They did, and found themselves before the dread Student
Conduct Committee. Relates Chris Robinson:

I'd love to tell you more about that proceeding, but I'm not at liberty
to do so. I will tell you this, though: it was deadly serious. It was an
open-ended procedure which could have led to any punishment up to
expulsion. It was a corrupt and biased proceeding which inspired in me a
terror I've not felt for many years, and constituted a cruel and unusual
punishment in and of itself, which I suspect was its intent.

Two weeks after their hearing before the student conduct committee,
Vice President for Student Life/Dean of Students Mike Edmonds finally
wrote
to the "Coalition of Some Dudes" students on March 25, stating that they
had been found guilty of "violating the student code of conduct policy
on violence" and that as a punishment, they would be required to hold a
forum to "discuss issues and questions raised" by "The Monthly Bag."
Although Edmonds acknowledged that the intent of the publication was to
satirize "The Monthly Rag," he wrote that "in the climate in which we
find ourselves today, violence—or implied violence—of
any kind cannot be tolerated on a college campus." Apparently, according
to Edmonds, "the juxtaposition of weaponry and sexuality" in an
anonymous parody made students subjectively feel threatened by chainsaws
or rifles.

Which is ludicrous on its face. If it hadn't been the chainsaws and
rifles, it would have been something else. The policies at CC are vague
and arbitrary enough to encompass any sin the administrators feel like
punishing.

The canonical
behavior of university administrators in such situations is
overreaction, followed (if necessary) by ass-covering
obfuscation and sanctimony.
President Celeste is quoted at Inside Higher Ed
engaging
in the latter:

Richard F. Celeste, Colorado College’s president, said via e-mail:
“Colorado College values and fosters freedom of expression, and in
discussions with students regarding “The Monthly Bag,” has
encouraged further dialogue about freedom of speech issues on campus.
The students involved in creating this publication were found to have
violated the college community’s standards, but they were not
sanctioned or punished. Instead, they were urged to engage the college
community in more inclusive dialogue, debate and discussion on freedom
of speech, and through a letter to the editor of the student newspaper
and other actions, they are doing so.”

Adam Kissel at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's
(FIRE) blog,
The Torch, calls bullshit on that:

This statement is false. The students were sanctioned and
punished. Take a look at their letter of
sanction by Dean of Students Mike Edmonds. Having a guilty finding
on one's record is a punishment. Having the letter put in each student's
file is a punishment. Being required to hold a "forum" is a punishment.
Being publicly shamed in a mass e-mail from the president is a
punishment.

Here's hoping that very bad things—nonviolent, of
course—happen to Celeste and Edmonds as a result of their
contemptible behavior.

FIRE's go-to page on this case is here, from which
most of the links in this article were obtained.

Twelve Mile Limit

This is number nine in Randy Wayne White's Doc Ford series. It opens
with a seeming tragedy: while four friends are
scuba diving a wreck in the Gulf of
Mexico, their boat sinks. One makes it to a navigational buoy and is
rescued by the Coast Guard; the others are not found after an exhaustive
search.

That would probably be that, aside from speculation, if one of the lost
divers was not a close friend of the Dinkin's Bay crew, including Doc
Ford. The surviving member saw just enough to raise a glimmer of hope in
Doc's mind, and he uses his contacts and wiles to pursue the real story.
The journey is tough but gripping, the climax grim.

This is (yet another) darn good yarn. Were I to quibble, I'd quibble
that Mr. White seems at time to be padding things out to a
contractually-agreed word count with digressions, flowery
description, and a couple irrelevant subplots. But no matter, because
White probably makes it more entertaining than anyone else could.
You can actually learn stuff here, not just marine biology, Doc's
adopted profession, but also self-defense, meteorology, South American
politics, and on and on.

It seems that, in this book, Doc has achieved a breakthrough in
introspection, finally making progress in integrating his past
life in supersecret service to America with his current persona
as a marine biologist. We'll see how this plays out.

Elementary

This well-designed
game checks to see how well you remember your chemical
elements. It's educational, not a waste of time at all! I got 51,
and some of the ones I missed—well, I shouldn't have. (Via BBSpot, whose proprietor claims a score
of 53. Hmph.)

Rocket Science

This movie got decent reviews (a solid 84% on the Tomatometer). It had a
decent number of laughs throughout. (Such is my insensitivity to such
matters, I'm not sure if I was supposed to laugh at some of those
things. Nevertheless …)

The protagonist is young teen Hal Hefner, who's got a number of strikes
against him. He's got a mean speech impediment, which causes him to
stutter, not on individual words—he's fine with those—but on
whole phrases, which he can't seem to connect all the way through to a
complete thought. His mom and dad have split up, and mom's now dating
an Asian-American small-claims court judge. His brother, a proud thief
of items small and smaller, calls him
various girls' names.

And he lives in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Which, I see from Google Maps,
is just the other side of
US Route 1 from Princeton, but might as well be on the other side of the
galaxy for Hal.

Things begin to change when brash, well-spoken Ginny recruits Hal to be
her extremely unlikely partner on the high school debate team.
She aims to win the state tournament, an honor previously denied her
when her debate superstar partner froze up at the podium the previous
year.

Now all this is fine, but I began to feel about halfway through that I
was being manipulated by the movie as surely as the most formulaic
explosion-sodden action flick.
Maybe the IMDB's keywords
will help a little:

Yeah, that's kind of a lot of stuff to fit into one small movie. It's
as if the filmmakers didn't have quite enough faith in their basic
story, so they just kept sticking in little plot doodads, until they got
it out to movie length.

The movie also seems to wear quirkiness on its sleeve, which I found a tad
annoying. Still, it's not the worst movie you'll ever see.

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